With her friend, Christy Miller, Susan Feola Wain ’69 teaches a group of Kibera children at the St. Vincent de Paul Nursery and Rescue Center outside Nairobi.

Wain had not received the invitation, but she says something clicked, and she declared, “I’m going.”

With that, Wain made a commitment to children who live 9,340 miles from the Scottsdale, Ariz., home she shares with
her husband, Leonard, and their blended family. Wain has traveled to Kenya four times, assisting at the Nyumbani Orphanage for children with HIV; teaching at Soweto Academy and St. Vincent de Paul Nursery and Rescue Center in Kibera; clearing land and planting at a facility for children with handicapping conditions; hiking a mile and a half over rough terrain to teach science to Maasai girls and boys and—an important component—learning to love the beauty of Africa.

“We go to help,” Wain explains, “but the volunteer organization doesn’t want us to leave with only negative images.” Wain has experienced the African Safari, been up close and personal with a family of mountain gorillas and celebrated her 60th birthday wading in an Indian Ocean tidal pool.

As a volunteer with the Denver-based Kenyan Children Foundation, Wain has seen progress each time she returns. More children at Nyumbani, the orphanage of her first mission, are thriving, for example, since drugs have extended the lives of those who are HIV-positive.

Wain, who retired in March as a senior vice president of claims at Scottsdale Insurance Company, is an advocate for professional advancement for women. A Spanish major at Oswego, Wain moved with a sorority sister from Pi Delta Chi after graduation to New York City, where she was hired by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company.

“I was at the right place at the right time,” Wain says of joining what had been a male-dominated business.

Responding to her positive SUNY Oswego experiences and subsequent career success, Wain has established a scholarship for an outstanding upper division business major at Oswego. She is also part of a group raising funds for the building of a dormitory at a day school outside Nairobi.

One evening, during group reflection on her 2014 Kenyan mission, Wain said it might be her last trip. No one believed her.

“I could make it my finale,” Wain says. “But I’d like to be there for the dedication of the dormitory. And, there are students I’d like to follow up with. And … well, there is always more to be done for the children of Kenya.”

As a person who loves to travel and is hardwired to help others, Wain says she’s grateful for her friend’s follow-up invitation in 2002, and she’s glad that, with no hesitation and a lot of faith, she responded, “I’m going.”

—Linda Loomis ’90 M’97

]]>http://www.oswego.edu/magazine/2014/08/08/changing-lives-and-discovering-beauty-in-kenya/feed/0Buffalo to Bogota: Around the World in 35 Years with Marianne Matuzic Myles ’75http://www.oswego.edu/magazine/2012/08/20/buffalo-to-bogota-around-the-world-in-35-years-with-marianne-matuzic-myles-75/
http://www.oswego.edu/magazine/2012/08/20/buffalo-to-bogota-around-the-world-in-35-years-with-marianne-matuzic-myles-75/#commentsMon, 20 Aug 2012 12:41:25 +0000http://oswego.edu/magazine/?p=3224When Marianne Matuzic Myles ’75 left her home near Buffalo to come to Oswego after high school, she was “a bit scared as all freshmen are” of moving so far from home and not knowing anyone.The journey she embarked upon that day in 1971 would be just the first step of a lifelong adventure that would take her literally around the globe as a U.S. ambassador.

In a career spanning more than three decades, Myles would represent the United States in Italy, Colombia, Uruguay and most recently, the Republic of Cape Verde, just off the west coast of Africa. She would negotiate a trade agreement that helped open China to the U. S. markets and control the embargo of goods to adversary nations.

The journey brought her full circle this spring when Myles, who is now dean of the State Department’s School of Language Studies in Washington, D.C., returned to campus as keynote speaker at Honors Convocation in April.

But it all began with that three-hour drive east on I-90 to a certain “friendly college” on the shores of Lake Ontario.

Marianne Matuzic Myles ’75 oversees 600 teachers and more than 2,000 students as dean of the Language School of the Foreign Service Institute in Washington, D.C.

A little bit of home made the transition more bearable. Myles was surprised to find a classmate from Mt. Mercy Academy, Patricia Weart ’75, living just a couple of doors down in Hart Hall. The two young women helped each other adjust to life on campus and eventually became roommates.

Myles’ formative international experience came in college. In her second year at Oswego she would study abroad in Madrid as part of Oswego’s Spanish program.

The late Richard Hyse, emeritus professor of economics, pointed Myles in the direction that would become her life’s work. He was her first economics teacher and sparked a passion in the young student looking for a major. Hyse’s course in comparative economic systems looked at the Soviet Union, China and other countries, and fueled a love of global economic policy that led Myles into the Foreign Service after crossing the stage in Laker Hall.

Jose Perez, who was the head of International Studies at Oswego in the 1970s, served as a mentor and counselor. “I am indebted to him as well,” Myles says. Through Perez, she met international students who impressed her with a motivation for learning so strong that they left their homes and traveled across the world for an American education.

Marianne Matuzic Myles ’75, right, received a Presidential Merit Award from President Barack Obama, for her service as the U.S. Ambassador to Cape Verde and other career accomplishments. It was presented by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a 2011 ceremony at the State Department.

In her senior year, Myles took the Foreign Service exam on a snowy winter’s day that almost discouraged her from making the drive to Syracuse. Just six months after graduation, she embarked on her new career, with her first assignment in Bogota, Colombia. She followed that with three years in Italy, working to open trade opportunities for American companies.

Another bit of Oswego experience served her well in the diplomatic corps. In Waterbury Hall, Myles spent hours learning to play bridge from fellow student and first husband, Peter Kunkel ’75, when she “should have been studying.” The game is played in many different places around the world, and the common bond of bridge helped her make new friends wherever she was posted during her career.

After earning a master’s in public administration at Harvard University, she represented the United States in Paris at a multilateral organization that controlled the export of high tech products to adversary countries that might use them in the manufacture of weapons. Her portfolio included semi-conductors, a fairly new technology at the time.

“I was scared as heck; I didn’t know anything about semiconductors,” she admits. “But I did a lot of research — being prepared is the key to being a leader.”

Myles learned all she could about the products and negotiated a deal protecting U. S. interests.

Later she would represent her country at the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, a United Nations-based group that controls the patenting of products worldwide.

Learning to Learn

Myles attributes her ability to succeed in these assignments to her Oswego education. “What you learn in college is not so much the subject matter, but you learn how to learn,” Myles says. “We didn’t have Google then,” so research ability was key.

The other thing she learned was being open to new experiences. “Whatever you are doing, you need to be constantly expanding your horizons,” she told students in classes during her spring visit to campus. “Be open to all kinds of possibilities and don’t freeze yourself in time.”

Now Myles oversees 600 teachers and 2,000 students studying 70 languages at the Language School at the Foreign Service Institute in Washington. Foreign service officers attend the school to learn the languages they will need in their overseas postings.

While much of her international work dealt with trade on a massive scale, Myles found ways to positively impact the lives of people in the countries she visited. In Cape Verde, she was active in getting help to improve the daily lives of women and girls.

Many girls in that African country cannot attend school because uniforms are required and that is expensive. If a family must make a choice to outfit a boy or girl for school, they will choose the boy while the girl stays home.

Myles worked through a contact of her current husband, retired Foreign Service Officer Stan Myles, to secure a donation from a Texas philanthropist. She took the gift to a women’s co-op, which then purchased cloth and sewed the uniforms. Thus the benefit was two-fold: creating employment for women as well as helping girls attend school.

Because there is no water system in the rural parts of Cape Verde, girls had to haul water for the family morning and night. In one village, they would walk 11 kilometers (about seven miles) hauling heavy buckets and arrive at school exhausted and unable to focus on their studies. Myles neogiated with a non governmental organization, or NGO, for the money to drill a well and pipe water to the village so that the girls could spend their mornings getting ready for a productive day in class instead of hauling water. “That donation directly freed the girls to get a better education,” she says with a happy smile.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has made it her mission to focus in a special way on women’s issues, and she has encouraged ambassadors to be aware and try to bring about positive change for women.

One change in particular animates Myles as she discusses it. By bringing together all the embassies in Cape Verde led by women ambassadors — an impressive total of six out of 12 permanent embassies — as well as several professional Cape Verdean women, Myles was part of a movement to combat domestic violence in the country.

“There were no shelters for victims of domestic violence and perpetrators were usually not penalized — it was seen as a husband’s right to beat his wife,” she explains.

The group included some women jurists who agreed to craft legislation to protect victims of domestic violence. Through their efforts shelters are being created and offenders prosecuted.

A moment of satisfaction for Myles was when she saw on the news a high profile husband convicted of beating his wife being taken to jail.

“Women judges, lawyers, police officers, educators and private citizens came together in a commitment to make it all happen,” she says, pride evident on her face.

“Now hundreds, and eventually thousands, of women can feel empowered and protected, because now we have this law,” Myles adds.

“I’m jazzed by it.”

Myles has traveled to 85 countries, logged millions of miles in the air and on land, and affected the lives of thousands of people on four continents.And to think it all started with a journey of 150 miles down the Thruway to a little place called Oswego.

Distinguished Teaching Professor of History Geraldine Forbes is sharing her knowledge, and collecting more, through a Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Lecturer Fellowship to India. Faith Maina, a SUNY Oswego faculty member and a new Fulbright Scholar, returned this school year to her native Kenya as she seeks to build the research and writing skill sets of young Kenyan scholars.

Forbes is teaching courses on gender and history, gender and visual history and other topics at the Calcutta University Women’s Studies Research Centre.

Forbes, who first visited India as a graduate student researching Indian Positivists in 1969, had a previous six-month Fulbright Research Grant to India in 2003-04 to work on a monograph, Photographic Imagery in the History of Indian Women. She said she plans to return to that project while she is in India.

The Fulbright proposal Maina produced grew from her experience with universities such as Moi in Eldoret, Kenya, working with young researchers as an editor of the JINSIA-Moi University Journal of Gender and Women Studies.

“They weren’t getting promoted because their journal submissions were not being accepted due to poor writing,” Maina said. “No articles, no promotions, no gender equity. I feel this (Fulbright) would be an opportunity to break some of this cycle.”

Maina attended primary and secondary school in Kenya, and did her undergraduate work at Kenyatta University in Nairobi. She learned to speak Swahili and English, in addition to her native Kikuyu, and wants the same educational opportunities for other girls and women in extraordinarily diverse Kenya, which has 42 distinct ethnic groups. l

Kamal Mohamed, right rear, SUNY Oswego professor of biological sciences and a Sudanese native, traveled to South Sudan last summer, saw the barren shelves of the library at Dr. John Garang Memorial University of Science and Technology in Bor, South Sudan, and came away determined to help. Through Books International Goodwill in Annapolis, Md., some 5,000 donated textbooks are making their way to Bor. Two former “Lost Boys” of South Sudan, Moses Kohr Joh, who works for SUNY Upstate Medical University, and Abraham Achiek ’09, second and third from the left in the back row, joined SUNY Oswego organizers and other volunteers to load 52 boxes of donated textbooks onto a truck which Marcellus Rotary volunteers Ed and Anita Diefes, left rear and left front, drove to Annapolis. Together with other books from Le Moyne College and Syracuse University, the cargo joined 15,000 more donated books bound for the university in South Sudan. Patricia Clark, third from left, associate professor of English and creative writing and director of African and African-American studies, was co-coordinator of the SUNY Oswego effort, with the support of Interim Provost Lorrie Clemo, second from left in front, and Ginny Donohue ’88, at right in front, founder of On Point for College.

]]>http://www.oswego.edu/magazine/2011/08/24/photo-campus-sends-books-for-sudan/feed/0Alumna Shares Photos of Chimpshttp://www.oswego.edu/magazine/2011/08/24/alumna-shares-photos-of-chimps/
http://www.oswego.edu/magazine/2011/08/24/alumna-shares-photos-of-chimps/#commentsWed, 24 Aug 2011 20:28:58 +0000http://oswego.edu/magazine/?p=1375Chimpanzees are a lot like humans, sharing 98 percent of the same DNA and many personality traits. That fact was in evidence in a special multimedia presentation on campus in February by wife-and-husband photography and video team Kristin Mosher ’89 and Bill Wallauer.

For 15 years, Bill followed the wild chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, capturing the intimate details of their daily lives for the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI), which is led by renowned primatologist and conservationist Dr. Jane Goodall.

Psychology major Nikki Packard ’11, left, talks with the wife-and-husband team of Kristin Mosher ’89, center, a much-published wildlife photographer, and Bill Wallauer, videographer for the Jane Goodall Institute, Feb. 10 during a visit to Distinguished Service Professor Paul Voninski’s Anthropology 280 class in Mahar Hall.

He has videotaped chimpanzee births, dominance displays, infanticide attempts, encounters with snakes and “rain dances.” Much of his footage is unprecedented — including capturing a live birth on tape.

Kristin is a professional wildlife photographer and sound recordist. She previously worked as a Jane Goodall Institute staff member, and continues to partner with Bill on production work for JGI. The alumna’s photographic work has appeared in many publications, including National Geographic,BBC Wildlife Magazine and numerous books.

]]>http://www.oswego.edu/magazine/2011/08/24/alumna-shares-photos-of-chimps/feed/0Ghana Goal Grips Groce-Wrighthttp://www.oswego.edu/magazine/2011/03/07/ghana-goal-grips-groce-wright/
http://www.oswego.edu/magazine/2011/03/07/ghana-goal-grips-groce-wright/#commentsMon, 07 Mar 2011 18:39:36 +0000http://oswego.edu/magazine/?p=509Cheryl Groce-Wright ’82 hopes her long run in Ghana goes a long way in helping the country get healthy.

“I’ve been on a mission,” Groce-Wright said.

In 2009, then-49-year-old Groce-Wright began mixing running into her walking routine around Richmond, Va., where she lives and works as an education consultant.

Cheryl Groce-Wright ’82 ran in the International Marathon Sept. 26 in Ghana to benefit the Longevity Project. She is pictured here after a recent race with her son, Carson.

“A minute became two and then five and I thought. ‘Well, maybe I can train for a race,’” she recalled. With a 10K and half marathon under her belt, Groce-Wright turned her attention to another goal — traveling to Africa.

The former Black Student Union member and African-American studies minor built a lifelong base for activism while a student studying communications at Oswego.

“I think that was the beginning and sort of awakening for me,” Groce-Wright said of her time at Oswego with professors emeriti like Kenneth Hall and Alfred Young.

In 2000, Groce-Wright met Ghana activist Nana Kweku Egyir Gyepi III while he was on a speaking tour. His vision for creating a Mecca in Ghana for African natives and descendents all over the world has intrigued Groce-Wright ever since.

She used her newfound love of running to finally make the trip to the African nation, running in the Accra International Marathon Sept. 26 and raising $1,660 for the Longevity Project, funding health initiatives and education in Ghana.

The race took on added meaning when, shortly after she arrived for the marathon, Groce-Wright learned her father had passed away.

“The race did end up being in honor of my father who ran with me the whole way,” she said. “And the rainbow at the start of the race told me he was right there with me, and that I was right where I was supposed to be.”

While her newly launched consulting service, Kaleidoscope Collaborative, focuses on interweaving diversity into education, Groce-Wright said she would like to someday work as a personal trainer. “I really have been so empowered by running and I feel that I can empower other people,” she said.

The advice of his late father really resonated with Richard Clarke ’82 as he approached age 50 in April. A few months and 19,350 feet later, Clarke reached great heights atop one of the world’s tallest mountains.

“Of all the things I’ve done, this was a killer,” said Clarke of scaling Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak. “It was just so satisfying to get to the top.

The altitude and air made the four-day trek particularly difficult, even for the avid cyclist, runner and general adventurer.

To build his endurance in the months leading up to his climb, Clarke played
tennis — for four to five hours a day, most days of the week. The strategy proved effective in training for his 15-hour days walking up Kilimanjaro and developing a mean backhand.

Clarke nurtured his adventurous spirit at Oswego, where he loved cycling all over Upstate New York. Bicycle trips to Syracuse, Watertown and Canada are fond memories, he said.

Late Professor Emeritus Dr. Girgis Ghobrial had a huge influence on Clarke, who initially came to Oswego for meteorology and graduated with a degree in geography. On his trip that included a safari and a stop in Eygpt, Clarke recalled many of the stories Ghobrial, a native of the country, would tell about his homeland.